International Society for Individual Liberty

The International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL) is a non-profit, libertarian educational organization based in San Francisco. It encourages activism in libertarian and individual rights areas by the 'freely chosen strategies' of its members. Its history dates back to 1969 as the Society for Individual Liberty, founded by Don Ernsberger and Dave Walter. The current name was adopted in 1989 after a merger with Libertarian International was coordinated by Vincent Miller, who became president of the new organization. Jim Elwood is the current executive director, with board members including Mary Ruwart and Ken Schoolland. ISIL has members in over 80 countries.

Home Page

Address

History

"ISIL began in 1980 as Libertarian International, founded by Canadian libertarian activist and publisher Vince Miller. LI started the international libertarian conferences in Zurich, Switzerland in 1982. The current ISIL was formed in 1989 through the merger of LI with the Society for Individual Liberty, the first explicitly libertarian grassroots organization which had been founded by Jarret Wollstein, Dave Walter and Don Ernsberger in 1969."

Staff and Associates

Web Sites

"Browse the links below to find libertarian and pro-freedom websites, organizations, e-texts, books, action opportunities, and much more. ... This resource directory was established in 1995 as part of Free-Market.Net: The Freedom Network. It is now published by ISIL."

Articles

"Also, Sam writes as though SIL, the Society for Individual Liberty, already existed at the time of the St. Louis YAF convention. Its predecessor organization, the Objectivist-oriented Society for Rational Individualism (founded by Jarret Wollstein), had existed for about a year at that time. Still, this is somewhat misleading. SIL was founded in St. Louis in 1969, while the YAF convention was underway across town."

The Case For a Libertarian Political Party, by David Nolan, The Individualist, Aug 1971
A few months before the founding of the Libertarian Party, Nolan presents his rationale for establishing a new political party, after discussing four other libertarian activist strategies and admitting that "political approaches are inherently coercive"

"Four years ago, at the YAF convention in Pittsburgh, there was born a unique coalition - the coalition that is known today as 'the libertarian movement'. ... Where, in 1967, we had no organizational home save the semi-hostile Young Americans for Freedom, today we have the Society for Individual Liberty."

"The fall of 1969 was, of course, a busy season for the nascent libertarian movement. At the same time SRI [Society for Rational Individualism] had jumped the Randian ship and turned Rothbardian, the student activists who had made up the Libertarian Caucus of the conservative youth organization Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) had decided to walk out of YAF en masse and seek institutional support for their activities elsewhere. That fall, SRI merged with the former Libertarian Caucus of YAF to create the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL)."

"By the end of this meeting, the Society for Rational Individualism had taken on several of the old YAF Libertarian Caucus leaders as directors and transformed itself into the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL), the first libertarian institution established by the first generation of libertarians for whom the libertarian movement was already a fact of life by the time they got old enough to be interested in ideas ... In 1989, the Libertarian International merged with the Society for Individual Liberty and became the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL)."